This invention relates generally to pastry items and methods for manufacturing pastry items. Additionally, this invention relates to a dough cutter device that creates geometrically themed pastry dough shapes having separable/severable cutouts.
Pastries are a popular food item in grocery stores, convenience stores, doughnut shops, state and county fairs, and other venues. These pastries are usually sold as a single serving. When several pastries are desired, the consumer must purchase multiple, separate pastries.
Some pastries are produced by placing several individual pastries together prior to frying or baking them. This approach grew from the desire to provide a grouping of pastries in a single package that allows the consumer to pull the pastries apart. Creating these “pull-apart” pastries is a difficult task. Most of these pastries are made by cutting out several smaller dough pieces and placing them together in a pan. This creates the illusion of a pull-apart type of pastry. Unfortunately, this approach is labor intensive and fails to provide for a pastry with multiple cutout pieces connected by a pull-apart web of dough.
It is desirable to provide pastries grouped together in a true pull-apart form that are capable of being packaged in a single package. It is also desirable to provide the pull-apart pastries in a variety of geometric shapes such as trapezoids, squares, circles, triangles, pentagons, octagons, semi-circles, four point stars, five point stars, six point stars, cartoon characters, and nearly any other possible geometric shape. Unfortunately, the industry lacks the ability to produce these geometrically themed pull-apart dough shapes in an automated manner using the currently available rotary or planar dough cutters.
A need exists for a dough cutter that is capable of generating large quantities of dough shapes for pull-apart pastries. Furthermore, a need exists for the dough cutter to be compatible with automation.